How fear of China might make America great again
We typically see fear as a negative emotion, and it often can breed hostility or hatred. But fear can also be a constructive force. We drive more carefully because we fear accidents and save because we fear hard times ahead.
So it is with the fear that the current regime in China is spreading across the U.S. political spectrum. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has centralized power, demolished democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and signaled a far more aggressive challenge to both the United States’ economic well-being and its influence in the world.
Our response to this fear does not have to descend into warmongering, and it shouldn’t mean abruptly cutting off cooperation with China in areas where, as on climate action, partnership is necessary.
But the danger China poses could fundamentally reorder U.S. attitudes toward government’s role in domestic economic growth, research and development in ways that leave the United States stronger. Part of the “better” in President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda is likely to include steps to maintain technological advantages and reduce dependence on China.
The new view was outlined last year by Jennifer Harris, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, in Foreign Policy magazine. “U.S. firms,” they wrote, “will continue to lose ground in the competition with Chinese companies if Washington continues to rely so heavily on private-sector research and development, which is directed toward short-term profit-making applications rather than long-term, transformative breakthroughs.”
They added that “the United States will be more insecure if it lacks the manufacturing base necessary to produce essential goods — from military technologies to vaccines — in a crisis.”
The implications of this approach might come to be called Sullivan’s Law: “We’ve reached a point,” Sullivan told NPR in December, “where foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is foreign policy.”
This view has a ally in Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. Schumer told me his original engagement with the China challenge came after a 2003 visit to Crucible Industries, a steel company in upstate New York whose owners said they could not compete effectively because of Chinese currency manipulation.
Schumer’s concerns have since broadened beyond currency issues to the theft of intellectual property and, more generally, to what he calls China’s “mercantilism.”
If “we have a dominant industry that does well,” he said, the Chinese government will “keep it out of China until they can steal from us, learn from us and then compete with us.” Schumer is particularly alarmed that China might overtake the U.S. in areas that affect economics and national security, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computing.
In 2020, Schumer introduced the Endless Frontier Act, which proposed spending $100 billion over five years to boost tech research and development. The bill also included $10 billion to create regional technology hubs, and new money for university research and college and graduate school scholarships.
The potential for bipartisanship on this set of questions is underscored by the co-sponsorship of the original Senate bill by Sen. Todd Young, R-ind. In the House, it’s co-sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-calif., one of the body’s most progressive Democrats, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-wis., a rising GOP national security voice.
Schumer and his allies are looking to introduce a new version that will also boost funding for domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and expand other domestic supply chains. And, as the majority leader, it’s Schumer who picks the bills that get on the floor.
If support for these ideas scrambles ideological lines, so will the opposition. More libertarian-inclined Republicans will remain wary of anything that smacks of industrial policy, while some on the left will worry that a military-technology complex will be this era’s echo of the Cold War’s military-industrial complex.
But the Cold War metaphors are instructive in another way. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, it set off a national panic that “made liberals out of nearly everyone on the education issue,” as the historian H.W. Brands wrote in his 2001 book, “The Strange Death of American Liberalism.” One result was the 1958 National Defense Education Act, as Congress “began searching for ways to produce scientists and engineers who would equal Russia’s.” Another, of course, was the space program.
Fear of falling behind an adversary has long been a powerful prod to national renewal. Even in a hyperpartisan time, that might still be true.